Uday Prakash - The Girl with the Golden Parasol

Am I working toward an MA in Hindi literature or Brahmin literature? In order to get across his revolutionary message, Buddha had to abandon Sanskrit, seeking refuge in Pali. So now, must Hindi be dropped in favor of using some other language to formulate ideas to provoke change? This means that now neither Buddha nor Gandhi would be a possibility in Hindi. Only Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra and the Padmashree Tiwari will survive!

“Oh, shit, shit, shit!” came out of Rahul’s mouth.

Anjali was looking at him with bewilderment. “What happened? You seem a little frazzled.”

“I’m okay,” Rahul said, kissing her forehead. “ I love you too much! I love you like I’m some kind of madman.” He stopped for a moment and gazed at her with a look of anguish, nearly imperceptible. Anjali recognized it, and knew herself what it was. Rahul’s face was now showing signs of swoon.

“Believe me, please! I really truly love you, Miss Joshi!” Rahul said in a weak voice.

“Tsk!” Anjali said, slapping Rahul’s cheek. But the slap she had lovingly placed on Rahul’s cheek at the “Miss Joshi” joke wasn’t a joking matter. It was a matter of deep suffering.

From all sides at once a windstorm suddenly sprang up, gusts crashing and cutting into one another. Anjali grabbed her parasol and clutched it tightly. Luckily it wasn’t open, otherwise it would have been carried away in the wind like all the dried leaves, grass, and plastic bags swirling in the air.

“We call this kind of storm a ‘dammon’ in my village — a ‘demon’ of wind. People say that if you chase down the first leaf blown in the storm and press it between your teeth, you’ll disappear, become completely invisible. Then no one will be able to see you,” Rahul said.

“I see!” Anjali said. “Should we try to find the first leaf?”

“We’ll never find that leaf with all that trash flying around, and even if we did, how can one leaf make two people disappear?” Rahul said, his mood lightening.

“Of course two people can disappear!” Anjali countered.

“From one leaf?” Rahul asked, uncertain.

“Sure!” Anjali was smiling.

“How?” It was perplexing to Rahul.

“No, really, they can disappear. I said they could, didn’t I? So what do you mean, ‘how’?” Anjali said, pushing her point.

“But. .” Rahul still wasn’t getting the logistics. “How?”

“Like this!” Anjali said, and wrapped herself around Rahul with all her might. Rahul felt that the two of them really had disappeared. No one could see them now. But they could see everyone — the entire world, the whole town, from one end of the sky to the other.

At one end of the field, behind a makeshift storeroom, at the foot of the hill, in a secret, deserted place between two big gray walls of rock, Anjali and Rahul had become invisible. All that remained was Anjali’s yellow parasol. That too was shut closed, hidden under a lentina bush.

And what about the other parasol? That was a butterfly, which had one day transformed its very form, playing a trick on the whole world. In front of everyone’s eyes and in broad daylight.

“You’ve stopped going to the gym?” O.P. asked. “You’ve been looking really weak lately.”

Rahul thought for a moment and said, “I’m still kind of afraid of something, but I don’t know why. I don’t think I did the right thing when I transferred to the Hindi department, yaar.”

“I don’t get it,” Hemant Barua said with a laugh. “Nothing’s ruined yet. To hell with Hindi. Take a short-term course at NIIT or Zap and get out of that hellhole.”

“It’s the same situation in the Urdu department,” Parvez said. “If Hindi’s a hellhole, then Urdu’s the underworld. Shahid didn’t even finish his first year. In the end, he gave up and opened a repair shop for fridges and TVs. Now he’s saying he’ll go to Dubai.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right in the thick of it, I’ll fight right in the thick of it, and I’ll be killed right in the thick of it,” Rahul laughed. It wasn’t a lighthearted laugh.

“Right, you dumb bastard, why pull yourself out of that gutter? That’s where your paracetamol is, where your parasol is, where your butterfly is, where your bird is. Everything’s in Hindi,” the ostrich cried out, and started humming frighteningly out of tune, “ My living is here, and dying is here, so where else can I go? ”

“Cut it out!” Rahul screamed. Everyone laughed.

Rahul’s thirst for Anjali increased each time they met. He felt as if the sea inside him began anxiously churning whenever he came close to Anjali, ready to swallow up the entire world with its cities, mountains, and people.

Each time he got back after seeing Anjali he felt as if a towering, mad wave born from his sea inside had crashed against the rocky base of a mountain, rebuffed, and now returning. Despairing, and in shock.

What remains, then, is the sea, each time left alone with its murky melancholy.

Today Anjali wore jeans and a loose white T-shirt. This time she and Rahul were on the third floor of the library in the corner of the south wall. There was a filthy, dusty window that had been shut tight for years and hardly let any sunlight through. Then, nothing but stacks and stacks of books.

In a narrow space between two book stacks, Anjali and Rahul conspired to disappear. The smell of old books, the faint light barely coming in through the window, the moisture from the damp walls, the fine dust. . Rahul and Anjali locked themselves in an embrace with such force, filled with such longing, it was as if they needed the entire expanse of the earth to make their wish come true. The space between stacks of books was too narrow.

Never before had Rahul lifted Anjali up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Those seconds were like suddenly finding oneself in the middle of a misty twilight. Both could scarcely catch their breath. Rahul’s half-closed eyes opened from their trance and regarded Anjali’s face, which had changed completely. Now it was some flower being burned by fire, quivering, wilting into an enchanting potion.

In that hazy moment, Anjali’s eyes appeared to Rahul. What eyes they were, watching a dream unfold of another world. Her eyes were strictly focused, but what she was staring at was some scene far off in the distance, of another realm, another time. She looked as if she would swoon.

They were like two fish swimming in the strong current of a stream, having touched one another, yet their tiny bodies still full of such longing for one another that they continue to swim, and they still want to pierce one another through and through. Time and again their bodies make innocent, improbable gestures to extract themselves from each other’s insides.

Rahul’s hand moved toward the zipper of Anjali’s jeans.

“No, no, what are you doing?” Anjali’s words scattered into the darkness, a semiconscious objection.

“Please let me,” Rahul’s whisper trembled in the air.

“No, not here,” Anjali pulled him tightly toward her.

“Where, then?” Rahul asked, his question floating heaven-ward.

Then a muted thud, as if a book had fallen off the shelf. Anjali and Rahul froze like statues and held their breath.

Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey were looking for something, a book, on the shelf next to the main door.

Rahul gently eased Anjali back down. The two of them crouched down and hid beneath the shelf, trying to control their nervous breathing.

Rahul finally took a deep breath only after Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey had left. Rahul noticed a book peering at them from the shelf behind: Ján Otcenásek’s novel Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness.